The driver turned the car around and started back toward town at a leisurely pace. “Look like you got in that house without no mishap,” he said, inviting me to tell him about what had transpired inside.
“Yes.” I did not relate the details.
“You meet old Ezra, I reckon.”
“The caretaker. He was there.”
“Ezra’s always there. He’s full-blooded Natchez ever since he was born on the place in slavery times, stayed on after freedom come, him and Aunt Polly. Now that Miss Amalia’s dead, I guess their last string’s been loosened.”
“Sir?”
“They got no more ties to the place, them two. I wonder where they’ll go, mebbe just stay on. Ain’t nobody going to live in that house now.”
“He was a slave?” Of course there were men and women still living who’d been bought and sold, but the sudden knowledge that my own family had owned them revolted me. “He couldn’t have been a slave. He’s white.” And then I remembered that the newspaper articles about Amalia’s death had mentioned a Negro servant who lived on Avoca. That must have been Ezra, and Aunt Polly was his wife.
“Ezra’s black as me, leastways he is inside. I don’t know where it is you come from, mist’es, but round here, folks say if you got the leastest drop of colored blood in you, you’re a colored.”
That struck me as ludicrous, but then, what constituted a colored man? What if this purply black man in front of me had one drop of white blood? Why wouldn’t that classify him as white? But unfamiliar with the relationships of black and white in the South, I kept my musings on race to myself.
The driver took me to the Eola Hotel, which was new and efficient and clean, and he carried in my suitcase, setting it down in front of the registration desk. A clerk in a rumpled suit, his hair parted in the middle and lying in damp curls about his face, greeted me in a soft voice. Everybody I’d encountered in Mississippi had a soft voice.
“Welcome to Natchez, Mrs. . . .” He dragged out the words, another Mississippi trait.
He waited for me to state my name, but, hoping to avoid a conversation about the Bondurant family, I simply corrected him. “It’s Miss, and I will be staying one or two nights, maybe three.”
When he looked at me as if I were new money in town, I added quickly, “Price is a consideration. I would like a reasonable room.”
“I think you will find our prices quite satisfactory.” He asked if three dollars would be acceptable, and I nodded my approval, quite pleased, for the rate was cheap.
“With private bath?” I asked.
“Course. All our rooms have private bathrooms.” He picked up a pen and dipped it into an inkwell. “May I inquire if you are vacationing in our city?”
His smile bordered on a smirk, and he seemed overfriendly. Then it hit me that perhaps the man thought that as a female alone, I was a woman of unsavory character, and his job was to spot such creatures and keep them out of the hotel. Or perhaps I was just being thin-skinned.
Still, my appearance was not in my favor. My white gloves, which lay beside my pocketbook on the registration desk, were crushed and filthy. My stockings had runs from where they had caught on the weeds at Avoca, and my shoes were dirty. My navy blue suit, which had looked so smart in Denver when I boarded the train, was as wrinkled as tissue paper and stained from the dust that had blown in through the open window of my compartment. My hair, stylishly straight at home, had crinkled into a nest in the dampness, and grime covered my face. “I’m here on business. In the morning, perhaps someone will direct me to Mr. Satterfield’s office. He is a lawyer. Do you know him?”
The clerk straightened, his smile slipped a little, and he tore up the card on which he’d written the room rate. “I think you will find our prices quite satisfactory indeed.” He wrote “$2.50” on the second card and turned it around for me to fill in. I took out my own fountain pen, the green marbleized one that David had given me four years ago for my twenty-ninth birthday, and wrote my name and address, then handed the card back to the desk clerk. He took a key from a cubbyhole behind him and summoned the bellboy. “Clyde, take Miss—” He glanced at my name on the card, then turned to me quickly. “Miss Bondurant?”
I nodded.
The clerk looked at the cabdriver, who stared at me as if I were the haunt now. He had been as ignorant of my name as the clerk.
“Well, it is a pleasure to welcome you, Miss Bondurant.” He crossed out the room number on the card and wrote in another, then exchanged the first key for a second. “Take Miss Bondurant to room three twenty-two.” It wasn’t clear if room 322 was a better or poorer room than the first one.
The bellboy didn’t look at me as I followed him into the elevator, and he closed the cage door and took me to the third floor. He left the elevator doors open as he carried my suitcase to the room and set it on a rack. Then he made a great show of opening the window, switching on the ceiling fan, and checking about the room to make sure that everything was in order. “You got your circulating ice water in here. It’s real nice to drink on a hot day.” He turned on a tap over the bathroom sink and filled a glass with water. Then he gave me a bold look. “The goat lady that was murdered, she your kin?”
The question made me shiver, since I’d never known anyone who’d been the victim of a crime, even robbery. Now I was to be identified by my relationship to a murdered woman. The boy’s nosiness also offended me, and I wondered what Aunt Amalia’s life had been like in this place, which, from my brief acquaintance with it, appeared to have atrophied since the Civil War. The Bondurant name certainly accounted for something, but was it respect or ridicule? The bellboy waited for my answer, one that would be repeated to the desk clerk. “I don’t know any goat lady,” I replied coolly, considering whether to forget his tip as punishment for his cheekiness. Or perhaps I should overtip, I thought, to make up for my disdainful reply. But there was no reason for my tip, too, to become cause for comment, so I gave him a quarter, which was the standard gratuity for carrying one’s suitcase in Denver. He seemed surprised and pleased, flipped the coin into the air, caught it, and closed the door. A dime would have been adequate.
Unpacking my suitcase, I hung up the few clothes I’d brought with me, then took off my suit, brushed it, and put it on a hanger. I rolled down my ruined stockings and threw them into the wastepaper basket, then massaged my thighs where the garters had left a ring. Next, I sudsed out my undies in the bathroom sink. I put on the soiled white gloves and washed them with a bar of soap, as if washing my hands. At last, I ran a bath and soaked in it until I was almost asleep. Toweling myself off, I took a thin nightgown from a silk bag and put it on, turned down the bed, and slipped between the sheets, the damp air in the room pressing down on me like a quilt.
To my surprise, I slept until eight o’clock the next morning, which was not so late, only seven at home, but it was the first time in many weeks that I had awakened feeling rested and almost peaceful, instead of weighted down with failure and guilt. But the demons that were my constant companions would return as the day wore on, intruding when least expected. In the past, they had come at unguarded moments, when I was admiring a hat in the window of Gano-Downs on Sixteenth Street and one evening as I walked past the Shirley-Savoy Hotel and heard a dance orchestra play “They Didn’t Believe Me.” That had been our song. Another time, I was looking out at the park from my apartment window, and the sense of remorse was so engulfing that it almost took away my breath. Perhaps being away from Denver, even on this strange mission to settle the estate of a crazy old lady, would give me a respite. I doubted it, however.
I leaned out the hotel window and looked toward the river. A white man across the street, his foot on a shoe-shine box, talked loudly to the Negro who was using a rag to apply polish to the man’s shoe. The slap of the rag punctuated the words, and a breeze carried the smell of the polish to my room. The air smelled of rain, but maybe that was just the everyday humidity in Mississippi. Rain in Natchez probably did not c
lear up the air, just added to the oppressiveness. I would look for a drugstore to purchase talcum powder, although it probably would not help much in keeping me dry. I bathed again, dressed, and put cologne on my wrists and the tips of my ears, stopping to view my short dark hair in the mirror over the bathroom sink. The dampness made it kinky, so instead of combing it into its usual straight, cropped look, I tried squeezing it into curls, rather liking the effect. The waves softened my too-large brown eyes and rounded my face, which was long. The rest of me was too long, as well—too tall, too thin. I had become even thinner in the months since my divorce and then David’s death.
Although it was still the coolness of the morning, the air was oppressive, stifling me in my wool suit. But there was nothing else to wear, since I had wanted to look businesslike for the meeting with the lawyer. Thinking the trip would be no more than a day or two, I had traveled light, bringing only an overnight case and a suitcase, which contained a second suit, two blouses, and a severe black wool dress, proper for a funeral, for surely there would be a service. Staying on in Natchez would require me to shop for something more suitable to wear in this heat. I considered the hat from the day before, a navy blue cloche that matched the suit, but the idea of the wool close around my face was too much, and I left it behind. Besides, the hat would smash my newly discovered curly hair.
Whether my outfit was proper for breakfast was unclear, since I was the only woman in the dining room. There was a hush when I walked into the coffee shop, either because I was a woman or because the word had gotten around that I was the goat lady’s niece. Instead of taking a stool at the counter, where someone might start a conversation, I asked for a table. But no sooner had I been seated and given the menu than a man dressed in rumpled white linen pants and white shirt, carrying a wrinkled seersucker jacket, got up from one of the tables, where he was breakfasting with several other men in crumpled clothing, and approached me. Did women in Natchez iron?
“Miss Nora Bondurant?” He had blond hair that was almost white and a mustache of the same color, and he held a white Panama hat in one hand. His face was pink, either from the heat or his age, which appeared to be in the mid-sixties.
I raised an eyebrow. For all I knew, he was selling cemetery plots, and perhaps I needed to purchase one. “What is it?” I chided myself for being so prickly. It seemed as if the least little thing offended me these days.
The man ignored my disdainful manner and pulled out a chair. “Of course you are. The hotel sent word you’d got here. I hope your trip was a pleasant one. I am Samuel Satterfield.” He pronounced his first name “Sam’l.”
“Oh, of course, Mr. Satterfield.” I held out my hand. He took the tips of my fingers and pressed them lightly, and I reminded myself not to offer my hand again to a southern man.
“You go ahead and order you your breakfast.” Mr. Satterfield sat down. “I hope there is something that satisfies. We Natchezians pride ourselves on our hospitality and our food. It’s mighty good, I can tell you.”
It was also mighty heavy. The menu included biscuits and gravy, hotcakes and ham, scrambled eggs and brains, and squab—squab for breakfast? I ordered a bowl of Shredded Wheat and coffee. Mr. Satterfield, who had left an unfinished breakfast behind, told the waiter, “Boy, you bring me another plate of ham and eggs, eggs over easy now, not too hard. And the lady’ll want a basket of beaten biscuits. I expect she’ll like them.” After the waiter left, Mr. Satterfield raised his eyes to the ceiling and said, “That bakery way upstairs, they beat the dough with a rolling pin till it blisters, beat it thirty, forty, fifty minutes. That’s your beaten biscuit, and you can’t find it nowhere better, South or North, than at the Eola.”
I didn’t argue. Nobody I knew in the North would spend the better part of an hour pounding biscuit dough.
The waiter poured coffee for us, and Mr. Satterfield added a generous amount of cream and sugar to his, then stirred the liquid and took a sip, holding the cup by the bowl instead of the handle. He added more sugar and sipped again, satisfied. “I had coffee in one of your Yankee cities, and it tasted like Borax. They brought it to me in a mug. No saucer, no place to set your spoon, excepting the tablecloth.” He shook his head at such a breach of good manners. “You’ll like our coffee.”
I tried mine, and I did.
“There’s talk you went out to Avoca last night.” He chuckled. “Lordy, Miss Nora! I apprise you it’s no place for a young lady in the daytime, and purely dangerous after dark, with all those trees and bushes. It bears down on a person some days. You could have broke your neck on that porch, or maybe stepped on a nail and got yourself a good case of the lockjaw.” He gave me a chiding look, as if I were a child.
“From your telegram, I’d assumed I would stay there.”
“You did?” His face fell. “Then I most certainly did you a wrong. I ask you to excuse it. If I’d known you were arriving yesterday, I would have made arrangements myself for you to stay here at the hotel. I am delighted you found it on your own. The Eola’s a real nice place, rightly priced. I see they gave you the rate for a traveling man.”
This did not seem much of a town for secrets. He probably knew I’d thrown away my stockings, too.
When the waiter set down our breakfasts, Mr. Satterfield passed me the basket of biscuits, which were the size of silver dollars. “Here’s you your beaten biscuit. Taste it and tell me if you’ve never had better.”
After chewing the biscuit, which tasted like a thick cracker, I admitted that I hadn’t tasted better, because I’d never tasted beaten biscuits before—and hoped never to again. Uneeda, the cracker company, didn’t have to worry about southern competition.
Mr. Satterfield looked at my meager breakfast and shook his head but didn’t comment. Instead, he poured syrup on his ham and eggs and on top of a white mass that he told me was grits, then began to eat. “The will is dull business, and we can commence to discuss the particulars at my office. Right now, you and me ought to get acquainted.”
“You knew my aunt.”
“Oh my, yes. A lovely lady. Tragic end. Just tragic.” He pursed his lips together. “I blame myself for not seeing this coming.”
“Were you friends?”
He considered the question while he cut into an egg and let the yoke spread into the grits. “All the old families in Natchez are friends. Breeding wouldn’t let ’em be otherwise.”
“Even if they lived with goats.”
“Ma’am?” Mr. Satterfield jerked up his head and looked at me, decided that was a joke, and laughed. “Miss Nora, we have our peculiarities here in Natchez. And Miss Amalia had as many as anyone, more than most, I’d say. We tried to help her. That’s the truth. But she was mighty proud, wouldn’t allow anybody about the place except for Ezra and Aunt Polly. They did for her, but at the end, they did not do a very good job of it. Course, it wasn’t their fault. Course it wasn’t. They thought Miss Amalia could protect herself. Many’s the time she run off somebody with a shotgun. She knew how to use it, yes. She could shoot like a man, ride like one, too, once upon a time.” He shook his head. “She wasn’t always queer, mind you. Why, after the War, she was thought to be the most desirable young woman in Natchez. I thought so myself.”
I frowned, wondering how old a woman had to be in Natchez before people stopped referring to her as “young.” “The war ended in 1918. My aunt must have been nearly sixty by then.”
Mr. Satterfield wiped his mouth with the bottom of the napkin he had tucked into his shirt front, and he looked at me as if I were pulling his leg. “Why, you Yankees! I don’t mean the Great War. When we talk about the War, we mean the War Between the States.”
“The Civil War?”
“We say the War of Northern Aggression, or, as the ladies prefer to call it, the Unpleasantness. It’s you Yankees who think of it as the Civil War.”
Actually, I did not think of it as much of anything. The Civil War was not a great topic of conversation in the West, and when we did talk abo
ut that war, it was a given in my family—among everyone we knew, for that matter—that the South had been wrong. My information about the war came from my grandfather Bullock, my mother’s father. He’d been a union soldier, was captured and sent to a southern prison camp. He went home to Iowa when the war ended, but after a couple of years, he sold his farm and moved to Colorado to recover his health. I thought it would be prudent not to mention that my grandfather had fought for the North or that Grandmother had once known Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant in Galena, Illinois.
“Captain Bondurant was a cavalry officer.”
“Who?” I reached for another beaten biscuit. Perhaps I could develop a taste for them. I bit into it and decided that was unlikely.
“Captain Bondurant, your grandfather. In my growing-up time, there wasn’t a boy in Natchez who didn’t want to be Captain Bondurant. Why even old Jeb Stuart couldn’t shake a stick at him.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know anything about my father’s family. You see, he died—”
“In nineteen and three,” declared Mr. Satterfield, finishing for me. “Oh, yes, I know. Struck down in the prime of life by an Oldsmobile autocar.”
“Yes.” I pushed my dish away, wondering how people could eat when it was so hot.
Mr. Satterfield, too, had finished his breakfast and now looked longingly at the beaten biscuits. “If you’re not going to eat them . . .”
“Help yourself.”
“I do hate to see good food go to waste.” He put several biscuits onto his plate. “It’s a pity you didn’t know Miss Amalia better.”
I sighed. “I thought it was clear that I didn’t know her at all, had not the least idea she was a relative until your telegram arrived.”
Mr. Satterfield moved his plate to the side and leaned back. He took out a silver cigarette case, then glanced at me, and I told him it was all right to smoke. In fact, I would have liked a cigarette myself, but I wasn’t sure it was proper for women in Natchez to smoke in public. He lighted it, leaned back in his chair, and blew smoke out of the side of his mouth. “You were a poor fatherless girl.”
New Mercies Page 2
